This Day in History: 24 August 2020
24 August 1572
448 years ago, today, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre occurred. King Charles IX of France, under the influence of his mother, Catherine de Medici, had ordered the assassination of Huguenot Protestant leaders in Paris. This set of a sequence of killings that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Huguenots across France. Catherine had ordered the murder of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny two days earlier, a Huguenot leader who she felt was leading her son into war with Spain. Charles promised to investigate the assassination to satisfy the Huguenots, but Catherine convinced Charles that a rebellion was soon to happen, prompting Charles to order the murder of the Huguenot leaders.
As Coligny did not die from Catherine's assassination attempt, he was instead brutally beaten and thrown out of his bedroom window. Once the killings began, mobs of Catholic Parisians initiated their own general massacre of Huguenots. The next day, Charles issued a royal order to stop the murders, but the massacres instead spread as his pleas went unheard. The mass slaughters continued into October, and reached the provinces of Rouen, Lyon, Bourges, Bordeaux and Orleans. In Paris, an estimated 3,000 French Protestants were killed, and in all of France, as many as 70,000. This massacre marked the resumption of religious civil war in France.
Want to find out more about the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre? Click here for more information, or click here for a video explaining more about the French Wars of Religion.
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